For a long time now I have wanted to write a tutorial about buying art
commissions from artists on the internet.

The images here are from an upcoming game about Pirates, Space Pirates!

Eventually I began working with a Hungarian Artist on the Galaxy Pirates RPG
project.

Sketches and Artist's renderings by Tamas Baranya, I asked Tomi if I could
show some of the Work In Progress stuff to give people a behind the scenes view
of the process and he agreed.

Ok, so in the last article I promised you an article on my ridiculously
cheap Humanoid labor robot that you could fit into a Shoebox! I was reading
about Inflatable Robots that DARPA was working on and thought "oh yeah I need
to make an Inflatable robot!" I toyed around with the idea for a while and I
thought that it would require a lot of pneumatic pumps, a lot of valves and
other kinds of hoses to inflate the various prices, then you still need the
motors and electronics to run the thing. What concerned me the most was the
idea that it would need a lot of redundant gas bladders and chambers in order
to remain usable if something stabbed it, or it walked over a nail or piece of
broken glass.

I didn't give up on Inflatable bots, the idea for an RPG that you could
carry your own minion around in your backpack until you had too much loot to
carry on your own, or too much loot to carry while fighting off bad guys or
running away was too irresistible for a world which won't have Bags of Holding.
The stabbing thing still kept gnawing at me though, I needed it to inflate
without holding air, what I really needed was for the whole thing to fold up
neatly and then unfold itself into a robot. It took a while but I remembered
the shape changing metamaterials from Batman Begins where his new cape could
become rigid like a glider when you ran an electrical current through it.

So I email Tomi and asked him to make me a shape changing metamaterial
robot. I hadn't read about soft robots at this point, soft robots are built
more like squids and octopus with less rigid structures and more squishing
around. I thought that my inflatable and memorymaterial robots could
selectively inflate their body segments and squeeze through areas much smaller
than their fully inflated forms. This was going to get cool, and a little
weird.

This is the first image of the Memory Shapechange materials Robot, Tomi
tried to push it farther than some of the other stuff we'd done before,
including the tentacles for hands, because we were leaving some of the rules
behind, new opportunities opened up. The Memory Robot is built from what looks
like overlapping plates or panels of material that reinforce each other. The
robot was supposed to kind of look sinister and I think we really got that. I
like the idea of bad guys dropping hundreds of them in a cargo container with a
few boxes of rifles and setting up hapless PCs to vanquish them. I just as
eagerly await players carrying them around to carry their loot for them, or in
an emergency carry them back to their ship.

Based on the sketch, we kept a lot of things the same, the Raven's beak
facemask got a little more angular in the final whereas the headshape in the
sketch was pretty streamlined for fitting through tight spaces and into a small
carrying case. The ball shoulder joints are mostly empty space and the whole
thing is powered by a standard powercell mounted between the shoulders. I'm
sure somebody makes them in a color other than Black, and somebody makes one
with a Sensor Unit (head) that isn't made from Nightmare Fuel.

So after we finalized the Memory Materials robot we went backwards and built
the Inflatable Robot that at least in the setting should have come before it.
Not only would they be cheap enough to still be using them, but they would
require a lower technology base to build and maintain, they would still have
many of the advantages I was looking for and could be made out of one of those
self-healing plastics so the puncture problem wasn't insurmountable, and since
the pumps were part of the unit, it could keep reinflating to replace any lost
pressure.

You'll notice we've got some basic Pincers on the Inflatable not the creepy
tentacles, he's kind of a Funny Balloon Animal version of a Robot and I like
him that way. I keep thinking they should be fiercely loyal to heighten the
sense of loss when they inevitably succumb to their greater overall
vulnerability.

We keep the feet rigid, no sense tempting fate with stepping on sharp
objects. So the Sensor Platform on this one has an even steeper drop than the
one that follows it, making the Rave's Beak an improvement over Walrusman?

So like the last article on Humanoid shaped Robots, the Inflatable series
robots jobs are to do anything a Humanoid can do, using Humanoid tools and very
little instruction. I have considered making Inflatable/Memory a chassis type
choice in the eventual Robots book, though there will be more body types
available than just Humanoid, DARPA's first inflatable is kind of a giant
Anteater you ride around and it carries your gear for you.

So breakdown of the Robot Drawings, all of them had concepts in mind, none
of them had a specific publishable project in mind. I have since decided that
all of the Robots could go into a game supplement which could be used in Galaxy
Pirates, the robots will be programmable like Animals are Trainable in most D20
OGL games..

-The final images were done in black and white, none of these are done in
color or rely on color, a lot of the equipment stuff is going to be in Black
and White, likewise Guns and Spacesuits don't always need color to show all of
their details. Certain thing like Grenades will be in color.

-Eventually I came up with a project the robot book, I will try to compare
it to other supplements for pricing and sales information which means I might
know how much money I might make back on it.

I hope this helps some of you out there looking to buy pieces for yourself
or for your own RPG projects.